Interactive Design of Xipi Lacquer Bracelets Inspired by Contour Lines

Xipi lacquer texture generation and interactive product design are important tasks for the digital preservation and creative use of lacquerware cultural heritage. However, existing methods still face limitations in reconstructing process-dependent Xipi lacquer textures and supporting interactive design. These limitations include the difficulty of parameterizing the traditional layering-polishing process, insufficient representation of nonlinear structural features in generated textures, and user fatigue in multidimensional interactive design. Inspired by geographic contour lines, this study proposes a design framework based on Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) and Interactive Genetic Algorithm (IGA). The framework uses pseudo-contour inputs to guide Xipi lacquer texture generation and integrates the generated textures into a user-guided 3D bracelet evolution process. Experiments on a self-compiled dataset show that the proposed model achieved PSNR (25.2), SSIM (0.855), LPIPS (0.285), and FID (38.2). User evaluation further showed the performance of the improved IGA in structural stability (4.52), color exploration (4.38), evolutionary rhythm (4.65), innovation retention (4.25), and interaction efficiency (4.42). The generated assets are further integrated into augmented-reality and virtual fashion-rendering scenarios, indicating the potential applicability of the proposed framework to the digital preservation and interactive design of lacquerware cultural heritage.